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" Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.' "

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" The days of the digital watch are numbered. "

" Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life. "

" I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them. "

" I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there. "

" I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education. "

" In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.' "

" I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated. "

" I loved the Beatles when they turned up, and the Stones when they turned up, and never really stopped liking them. "

" I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me. "

" When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about. "

" I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament. "

" I really just like to be at a desk. "

" People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that. "

" I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon. "

" I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking. "

" Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond. "

" Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there. "

" Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "

" Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. "

" As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that. "

" My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers. "

" A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors. "

" I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong. "

" The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now. "

" To wrap up the idea of 'Parade's End' in a sentence or two, I would say it's a love story in which we see a man with two women, and we know what's attractive about them. And we know why and what they feel about him. "

" Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour. "

" I am good at being shown something and counterpunching. "

" If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play. "

Change The World

" Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it. "